You never can tell what a summer will be remembered for. The summer of 1975 got Jaws, the summer of 1916 got the Somme. One summer gets a hummable ditty from Mungo Jerry that will be played on the radio until the end of time, and another summer gets Hurricane Katrina. With about four weeks …
By the end of the week, we will embark on the 40th anniversary of one of the most amazingly newsworthy months of our history. July 16th, of course, is the anniversary of the day in 1969 that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first me to walk on the moon. Two days after that, …
It was one of those good days, a mood changer. Went down to Chelsea to sign some papers for Joe Cilibrasi, and then decided to grab some lunch in a barbecue joint, and right at the next table was my friend Sharon Jautz, the former head of HR at Playboy, now blonde and tan and …
I love David Brooks. He is so wise, and temperate, and fair-minded, and even-handed. And reasonable. There may not be a more reasonable man tapping a keyboard in America today. Every time I read one of his columns, I feel a warm, gentle, reasonable arm around my shoulder, gently guiding me towards the path of …
Ladies and gentlemen, your brand new traffic-less Times Square. Much less life-threatening now. One of very favorite sites from an ever-rapidly disappearing Times Square: The old I. Miller Shoe Company on the northeast corner of West 46th Street and Times Square, a great shoe-supplier to the stage during the theatrical heyday of the 1920s, when …
“It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day. . . ‘’ 1967 will always be remembered for Sgt. Pepper and the Summer of Love, but I can never come across this day on the calendar without thinking of another song from that summer, the Raymond Carver-like short story that the beautiful Bobbie …
There was a time when a literary-minded soul could go into a Barnes & Noble anywhere in this great nation and buy him/herself a canvas tote bag that had been emblazoned with the likeness of Charles Dickens or George Eliot or Virginia Woolf or some other giant of letters. Now there is a new face …
In June we will welcome a new comic book, Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli. Barack the Barbarian? Did you see him at the White House Easter Egg Hunt yesterday? Here are two images that have been released. Is that supposed to be Hank Paulson behind Obama? Is that Michelle or, like, …
True story–I’m in the car this morning, the radio is playing `Breakfast with the Beatles.’ The host has a special guest: Donald Trump. Host says, `Donald, what is you favorite Beatles song?” And Donald says, “Well, I have many, but I always liked `Eleanor Rigby.”’
Happy 200th birthday, Abe Lincoln. Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin. Now, I’m not really any good at math. I think it’s the reason I’ve never been able to finish Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein. Or understand magazine articles about card-counting. Or why, on those occasions when underwriters have explained mortgage amortization to me, all …